... The Americans who gave so generously to the Red Cross last year surely did not imagine that six months later their dollars would be paying the mortgages of wealthy TriBeCans ...Let the New Yorkers have it. All of it. Hand it out on the streets. Disperse it from low flying aircraft. Slip into peoples' pockets or purses as they shuffle past. I can think of far worse ways to dispose of the excess cash than to simply give it away.
I think you found exactly the right reaction to this. I admit that, while reading the article, I was irritated with the folks looking for the windfall, but that's really secondary to the real lesson of this. Confronted by the mind-boggling horror of 9-11, we were stunned (for about a day), began to greive (still going on), but at the same time got to work and fought back, and dug into our pockets to send millions of dollars to New York. More money, in fact, than the gross national product of a lot of nations. And we got really bent out of shape at the hint that less than 100% of that money would go to New York, and further, we would like it distributed Right Now. We know that there's no way to "fairly" distribute that much money that fast (and the Red Cross is the last outfit to be trused with that task in any case). No, this is a uniquely American attitude, a full-throated, red-blooded, belly-rubbing affirmation of life and possibility. It's going to take a lot more to get us down Osama Bin Skyhook and his cronies.